Leave a Comment

Sunless Sea director’s next game is all about crafting new, cultish words

In what he is entitling “devlog zero,” Alexis Kennedy—former CEO of interactive fiction developer Failbetter Games and creative director of the astounding Sunless Sea (2015)—has announced his newest project: Cultist Simulator.

Kennedy describes the project as follows: “Cultist Simulator is AdVenture Capitalist meets single-player Fallen London meets Doodle God, set in the NOON world that I’m going to build my next game in.” It’s a crafting game for English language nerds, allowing you the ability to combine words by their meaning into new words that take elements of the old and incorporate them into a wholly new product. At its core, it shares the base structures of all crafting systems: you are making things out of other things.

its own form of narrative crafting

Combining a clicker game with a large-scale work of interactive fiction (not to mention the other mentions that Kennedy drops in their post) is a determinedly original premise, its own form of narrative crafting. That you can then take “a Family Connection and a Wistful Dream together and create a Horrible Tragedy” has all the promise of a late night with a good Russian drama—it was Tolstoy who opined “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’

Cultist Simulator is still in early alpha, and if the earlier description tickles your fancy—or indeed if your interest is peaked by the world’s tiniest screenshot—you can find out more information from Kennedy’s mailing list.